Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has launched a collection of his old speeches in what he has termed a ”landmark book”.

On Wednesday morning, Mr Abbott presented A Strong Australia – a 146-page tome of nine key speeches he has given over the past year, including his budget reply and National Press Club addresses.

Mr Abbott told a crowd of Coalition MPs at Parliament House that he was very proud of the book. ”I represents a lot of intellectual toil,” he observed, noting that all his frontbenchers and the Coalition’s backbench committees had contributed.

Perhaps that’s why the book does no specifically state who the author is (although a note on the back page states it is ”copyright Tony Abbott”).

Mr Abbott said the book represented a distillation of the Coalition’s ideas and values – covering ideas about the economy, environment, border security and infrastructure.

It also comes with several glossy photos of the Opposition Leader at work and at home – including a sombre picture of him looking out of a plane window, a photo of the Mr Abbott reading to a child and a shot of him talking to his wife, Margie, against a bushland backdrop.

Mr Abbott said the Coalition had a three year plan for re-election. He said year one was about establishing values, year two was for developing plans and year three ”will be the year of our policies”.

As Mr Abbott ran through the opposition’s policies today, his pledges to cut the carbon tax and strengthen border security received the biggest ”hear, hears” from the audience.

The book comes as the opposition tries to counter government attacks that Mr Abbott is too negative.

Introducing Mr Abbott, Nationals Leader Warren Truss said the Coalition had ”a positive plan and we’re lead by a positive man”.

A Strong Australia is published by the Liberal Party, and will be available as a free e-book.

This is Mr Abbott’s fourth book. In 2009 he published Battlelines, part memoir of the Howard years, part policy manifesto. In the 1990s, at the height of the republic debate, he wrote two books on constitutional monarchy.

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